"Abracadabra! A cloak of invisibility for millionaires"
'It’s weird, isn’t it? There’s a huge market out there for cars that are inspiring to drive but that could pass through a library without causing anyone to look up. Yet the options are so limited that today Boris Johnson is forced to go about his business in a Toyota van. And God knows what the current director-general of the BBC has — a Brompton foldaway bicycle, probably.
Happily, however, help is at hand in the shape of a new Volkswagen Golf. It’s called the R, and I shall say right at the outset that I have not yet driven it, or seen it. And yet it fills my heart with hope because on paper it looks absolutely perfect.
I spent an hour or two on VW’s online configurator this morning, adding all the things I would want fitted as optional extras, and the final price was £34,000. A lot for a Golf. But not a lot at all for what you’re getting here.
Under the bonnet it has the same basic 2-litre turbo engine as you find in the GTI. But by fiddling with the boost from the turbocharger, the valves and the pistons, the engineers have upped the power to nigh-on 300bhp. That’s almost 80bhp more than in the GTI. Which is probably why it’s been fitted with four-wheel drive.
Of course we’ve seen four-wheel-drive Golfs before, and they’ve been very impressive in a straightforward, no-nonsense, keep-you-going-in-snow kind of way. But on the R the all-wheel- drive system is allied to VW’s new electronic differential — pay attention at the back — and that is a combination that makes me drool extensively.
The grip afforded by that diff in a front-wheel-drive GTI boggles the mind, so God alone knows what levels of barnacle tenacity will be achieved by its electronic wizardry and all-wheel drive. I should imagine your face will come off before the car actually loses traction.
The word is that, to drive, this vehicle is sensational, but, better than that, it looks like the sort of Golf that your mum has. It doesn’t even get the red line on the radiator grille that you find on a GTI. You could take an R to a meeting of the Socialist Workers party and they’d embrace you as a brother. It’s that nondescript.
Which for many, many people makes it absolutely perfect.'
Verdict: 'Goes like a rocket, sticks like a limpet. 4/5 stars'
Seems like he's quite excited!
